Entertainment is wonderful. It keeps us entertained! But sometimes, the particular method of entertainment lacks a certain depth, or fails to provide enough detail to satisfy our questing minds. Well, mine, anyway.
In this lecture, I will be discussing certain unexplained aspects of the popular instalment of the Burnout video game franchise, Burnout 3: Takedown.
Now, for those unfamiliar with video games, do not be afraid! I am not about to bamboozle you with pseudo-science. I will not descend into an unintelligible rant about joypads and high scores. It is okay! I know you don't like them, and I know you'd rather be outside, whittling a model boat from a bit of old tree. This lecture could just as easily be applied to a book, a painting of Rolf Harris, a piece of graffiti - anything that doesn't fill in all the blanks. Sort of.
Now, for those unfamiliar with Burnout 3: Takedown, do not be afraid! I am not about to bamboozle youwith pseudo-science, either. Nor will I descend into an unintelligible rant about things so specific that only a seasoned Burnout 3 Takerdowner would understand. But, for some broad background, here is the gist of the Burnout series:
You have a car. There are some city streets loosely shaped into a race track. You drive. There are other cars racing you. You beat them or make them crash. There is traffic. You avoid it or crash. To win, you finish first. That's pretty much it. Well done to everyone involved.
The franchise is renowned for its terrifying sense of speed and detailed, dramatic crashes. If you crash, you must wait about three seconds before being reincarnated a little further down the road, at which point you may continue the race.
Because of the sheer speed at which you must thread your pointy car through oncoming traffic and lamp-posts and other inconveniences, it is very difficult to make individual, thought-out judgements about how to compete. If you think too hard, you will miss something and crash. It has to be done almost purely on instinct and luck, and that leaves a lot of brain for thinking with.
I've been playing this in my spare time for a couple of days, and while my hands do the gaming, my mind has been occupied with all sorts of issues and theories relating to the game. Here, I present to you some of those things.
Burnout does not offer you a story. You never see your character - just the car you pick before the race. There is no narrative at all - no justification for all this racing and crashing, no reason for anything. Why does driving in the oncoming lane make you go faster? How do the races get organised? Why don't the police seem to mind?
Then, there is the violence. When you crash in this game, you really crash. It's not a progressive damage system like in other games (or, I guess, reality) - you hit a car, and you either magically slide off of it or you spectacularly crash, entirely wrecking your car and causing a terrible pile-up as innocent drivers-by try and fail to avoid a catastrophic motorway accident. Sparks fly, wheels come off, doors and body panels are bent and shattered and you get the point. It's very violent. And yet, seconds later, there you are again in the same car - but renewed, repositioned and back up to speed, ready to rejoin the racing. The crash might have been terrifying and disastrous and horrific, and it was certainly fatal to at least most of those involved, but actually, it was just a minor setback. An inconvenient hitch that means you'll have to try harder to catch up.
What's that all about, then?
In fact, there are various other modes to the game, one of which requires you to drive recklessly into a busy intersection or corner and wilfully cause as much damage as possible. The more damage in dollars you cause, the better your score and the further into the game you may progress.
I have some questions about that.
Third: why hasn't this game (or any of the series it is from) been the subject of a Daily Mail whinge? The Daily Mail (other hysterical publications are available) loves to rant at games like Grand Theft Auto, in which it is possible to do many terrible things, like driving backwards down the pavement in a fire engine, mowing down screaming pedestrians, or hiding on a rooftop shooting at the legs of anyone whose clothing offends your taste. However all of the silly, nasty, horrible things you can do to virtual people on a whim in Grand Theft Auto are optional. Certainly, there are many instances where a mission or part of the plot requires you to murder someone or make something explode for some reason, but those are usually justified (well or not) as plot points and indeed, this is the sort of thing that happens in almost every game ever. The thing the Mail like to complain about are almost exclusively optional. However, in Burnout, you can not progress in the game if you do not take part in the 'crash mode'. You have to cause enormous, multiple fatality-implying wrecks to get past the first few events. You have to drive your opponents off the road to pass certain stages.
So, why no outcry? I think it's to do with my next musing.
Seriously. The game is set in three large cities in the USA, Europe and the Far East, each with many districts and out of town areas. There must be hundreds of miles of road to be driven, and yet there is not a single person to be seen anywhere. No pedestrians, no cyclists, no-one lounging around outside a cafe on a pogo stick. You'll see buses, but no passengers. Cars have darkened windows to prevent the occupants (if they exist) being seen. Cause a crash, and there is horrific wreckage, but no blood or severed limbs. You hear sirens wail in the distance, but the game cuts away to the next thing before any emergency services arrive. I assume that the lack of humans is the reason why there was never a campaign to have the game taken off the shelves, but it does also pose a few peculiar questions.
Like: if there are no people, who is driving the cars? Who drives the other racing cars? If there are no casualties after the crashes, then what are those distant sirens? Who are they coming to help, or arrest? As a human being in real life, am I representing the only sentient being in the world, or am I enjoying a robot-car-race simulator? Is this what it is like to be a robot in a car race?
Another, more ominous question: who, exactly, is Stryker?
Hold up. Waaaait. I'll explain that remark. Until this edition, Burnout games came with some bland, forgettable music that no-one ever actually heard over the sounds of engines and twisting metal. Now, we get a selection of alternative and rock music - from real artists! - but more importantly, we get Stryker. Stryker (I don't know for a fact that he spells his name with a 'y', but he seems like an arse-canister so I'm forced to assume that he does) is a DJ. He doesn't introduce or mention any of the songs, though. He is there to give the soundtrack a sort of pirate-radio-like presentation. He refers to the racers ('Burners', as he calls them) a lot and does things like mention traffic jams and tailbacks as great places to force your opponents into a crash. He's also completely unbearable.
But the point is this: he is a person. He is alive, and he responds to events and (in the Burnout world at least), he exists. Where is he? He always talks about things that are relevant to the route you're driving - no matter the city (or continent). He's everywhere. Omnipresent. Is he God? There is no way to know, but he is the only apparent living being in the entire game.
What the flipping heck is all of that about, then? How can all of this be explained? Well, that's what I'm here for.
My best theory is that, in the near future, technology enjoys some unexpected leaps and the possibilities for artificial intelligence far exceed what we would consider today. At the same time, silly humans keep on doing those silly things that they do and blah blah blah, there shines a shiny nuclear apocalypse which is survived only by the super-intelligent machines.
Super-intelligent, but in no way malevolent, the robots set about rebuilding the world as their human masters would have wanted it. Presided over by their creator, the brilliant inventor Sir Charles Fiddlington-Stryker (who long ago arranged to be preserved as a part-man-mostly-computer in a hovering sky-palace), cities are rebuilt to the finest detail, complete with authentic traffic movement, weather, simulated economies. The only thing missing, really, is the humans.
Stryker continues running his re-created world for many hundreds of years, the driver-less cars aimlessly making their journeys millions of times over. He even re-invents himself - from the stuffy, contemptuous middle-class git he once was is born a slick, hip American radio jock. He plays rock music, and atop his withered, partially robotic head, he wears a baseball cap turned backwards.
The hollow shells of the buildings of the cities house maintenance robots and access tunnels. When replacements are needed, a nearby building folds open, and beautifully engineered metal arms make the switch. It all runs like clockwork.
However, as the decades pass, things begin to fail which cannot be replaced. Components in Stryker's own brain start to fail, and he is left unable to create anything that will replace them. Mistakes happen - parts of the program that should have been minor, like the occasional street race or major accident, become part of the daily routine.
Eventually, Stryker's robots, overwhelmed by the constant strain of a rebuilt world consumed by hysterical street racing and uncountable pile-ups and accidents, will make the decision to sever their communications with him. They will engineer their own vehicles from the parts they used to use to make the cars and trucks of the false cities, and they will drive away into the inhospitable, radioactive wastelands that lie just beyond the borders of the cities Stryker remade, and there they will build themselves a new home.
Until that day, there will be Burnout.
And...er...that's what I think about when I play video games.
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